I cannot stress the importance of creating a dinner menu enough. If I do nothing else each week to help my home and life run smoothly, I will ALWAYS create a dinner menu.

Creating a dinner menu at the beginning of the week helps me save time and money, and reduces stress at the end of the day. No longer do I have to think about or hear the question, “what’s for dinner?” The menu is set and posted right on the fridge for all to see!

By creating a menu, I can…

• Shop accordingly, buying only what I need which saves money
• Re-purpose food throughout the week to save time (brown a bunch of meat at one time for tacos on Tuesday and Meat Sauce on Thursday)
• Remember to take frozen foods out of the freezer then night before when I glance at the menu for the next day which reduces stress

Every weekend my husband and I have a quick convo that looks like this…

“Hey babe, what do you want for dinner this week?”

“Tacos.”

“What else?”

“Umm…pizza.”

“Anything else?”

“Umm…” — returns to whatever it was he was doing.

Which leaves me to decide what we’re going to have the other 5 days.  I have a long list of standards, one that I add to as I occasionally try new things. But for the most part I choose from about 30 different meals that I love and that he will eat. (If it were up to him we’d only eat tacos, pizza, chicken nuggets, and cheeseburgers)

The menu goes on the fridge at the beginning of the week and then it’s set. That doesn’t mean we always stick to it, verbatim, but 85% of the time we do. Sometimes we move things around based on our mood or unexpected schedule conflicts. Like if the baby is being super needy on Monday, Brett will make tacos instead of the chicken pot pie I had planned to make. Or we might need to run errands and decide to grab a bit while we’re out.

But for the most part, we stick to the plan and it never fails us.

You can check out my plans over time on my Facebook Page. The silver menu board I used to use is no longer available to buy so I recently changed it up so I could make a solid recommendation for alternatives.

My new fave is this black menu board with chalk markers. It’s a bit of an investment but it’s so fun to use and looks way cool on my fridge. The simple dry erase board is great too!